Suggestibility as an operant factor in advertising effects, cognitive defences and the issue of consumer sovereignty

This paper is a response to two recent, unrelated studies in the ongoing issue of unconsciously processed advertising messages, one on similarity of hypnotic suggestion to suggestion in advertising, the other discussing more recent, similar constructs from psychology called the Duel Process Model in regard to the susceptibility of children to advertising. Implications for understanding low involvement advertising effects are discussed, plus the potential for a research agenda. The main theme of this paper is that it is clear that suggestions can be received without conscious awareness, but whether these are acted on may depend, as the hypnosis literature indicates, on a similarly unconscious filtering mechanism which retains control over consumer behaviour. Recent attempts to uncover these unconscious mechanisms have demonstrated the existence of such activity. The main conclusion of this paper is that consumer sovereignty remains a political, rather than a research issue

Participatory sensing as an enabler for self-organisation in future cellular networks

In this short review paper we summarise the emerging challenges in the field of participatory sensing for the self-organisation of the next generation of wireless cellular networks. We identify the potential of participatory sensing in enabling the self-organisation, deployment optimisation and radio resource management of wireless cellular networks. We also highlight how this approach can meet the future goals for the next generation of cellular system in terms of infrastructure sharing, management of multiple radio access techniques, flexible usage of spectrum and efficient management of very small data cells

Reading Lists in Cambridge: A Standard System?

In June 2008 a committee of librarians from across the University convened to investigate ways of improving library services, with particular regard to elearning and the provision of services to undergraduates. Reading lists quickly emerged as the major factor in undergraduate library use, as influential on the types of resources used by undergraduates, and as an area where there was potential for an improvement to the student experience. One of the committee’s recommendations was that an application be made for an Arcadia Fellowship to investigate issues surrounding the adoption of a standard system for dealing with reading lists. The proposal was felt to map well onto the core issues highlighted by the Arcadia Programme – particularly Changes in Higher Education, New generations of library users, Technology and Changing academic workflows. This report is the result of that Fellowship.The Arcadia Programme has been generously funded by a Grant from the Arcadia Fund http://www.arcadiafund.org.uk

Mind the gap: National and local partnership in the Irish public sector

This article uses case study data from a major Irish city council to investigate and explain public sector worker attitudes towards social partnership at local and national level. It is argued that the more sceptical attitudes to workplace partnership reflect structural differences between local and national arrangements, which have enabled public sector employers to use ‘social partnership’ as a constraint in the implementation process of a pre-determined public sector reform agenda

Attitudes, meaning, emotion and motivation in design for behaviour change

Copyright @ 2012 Social Science Electronic PublishingThis paper discusses some distinct -- but related -- psychological concepts which are relevant to design for behaviour change, but of which some, at least, are not necessarily within the scope of 'conventional' interaction design. They may fall superfi cially along the cognitive blade of Simon's scissors (1990), dealing with users' thought processes rather than the contextual interaction environment itself, but the interaction of meaning and form demonstrated by product semantics (section 2.1) makes it clear that cognition depends on context: the scissors must work together. While design for emotion (Desmet and Hekkert, 2009) is enjoying increasing attention and practical application, including in behaviour change applications (e.g. Visser et al, 2011), influencing and supporting motivation through design is underexplored except by a few pioneers such as Bisset (2010), while the complexity of work on attitudes and persuasion has not necessarily lent itself to practical design applications to the extent that it might. Nevertheless, much public discourse on behaviour change persists with a preoccupation with measuring and 'changing' attitudes

Evaluation of a Pervasive Game for Domestic Energy Engagement Among Teenagers

In this article, we present Power Agent—a pervasive game designed to encourage teenagers and their families to reduce energy consumption in the home. The ideas behind this mobile phonebased game are twofold; to transform the home environment and its devices into a learning arena for hands-on experience with electricity usage and to promote engagement via a team competition scheme. We report on the game’s evaluation with six teenagers and their families who played the game for ten days in two cities in Sweden. Data collection consisted of home energy measurements before, during, and after a game trial, in addition to interviews with participants at the end of the evaluation. The results suggest that the game concept was highly efficient in motivating and engaging the players and their families to change their daily energy-consumption patterns during the game trial. Although the evaluation does not permit any conclusions as to whether the game had any postgame effects on behavior, we can conclude that the pervasive persuasive game approach appears to be highly promising in regard to energy conservation and similar fields or issues

Gathering realistic authentication performance data through field trials

Most evaluations of novel authentication mechanisms have been conducted under laboratory conditions. We argue that the results of short-term usage under laboratory conditions do not predict user performance “in the wild”, because there is insufficient time between enrolment and testing, the number of authentications is low, and authentication is presented as a primary task, rather then the secondary task as it is “in the wild”. User generated reports of performance on the other hand provide subjective data, so reports on frequency of use, time intervals, and success or failure of authentication are subject to the vagaries of users ’ memories. Studies on authentication that provide objective performance data under real-world conditions are rare. In this paper, we present our experiences with a study method that tries to control frequency and timing of authentication, and collects reliable performance data, while maintaining ecological validity of the authentication context at the same time. We describe the development of an authentication server called APET, which allows us to prompt users enrolled in trial cohorts to authenticate at controlled intervals, and report our initial experiences with trials. We conclude by discussing remaining challenges in obtaining reliable performance data through a field trial method such as this one

The golden circle: A way of arguing and acting about technology in the London ambulance service

This paper analyses the way in which the London Ambulance Service recovered from the events of October 1992, when it implemented a computer-aided despatch system (LASCAD) that remained in service for less than two weeks. It examines the enactment of a programme of long-term organizational change, focusing on the implementation of an alternative computer system in 1996. The analysis in this paper is informed by actor-network theory, both by an early statement of this approach developed by Callon in the sociology of translation, and also by concepts and ideas from Latour’s more recent restatement of his own position. The paper examines how alternative interests emerged and were stabilized over time, in a way of arguing and acting among key players in the change programme, christened the Golden Circle. The story traces four years in the history of the London Ambulance Service, from the aftermath of October 1992 through the birth of the Golden Circle to the achievement of National Health Service (NHS) trust status. LASCAD was the beginning of the story, this is the middle, an end lies in the future, when the remaining elements of the change programme are enacted beyond the Golden Circle

Stakeholder involvement, motivation, responsibility, communication: How to design usable security in e-Science

e-Science projects face a difficult challenge in providing access to valuable computational resources, data and software to large communities of distributed users. Oil the one hand, the raison d'etre of the projects is to encourage members of their research communities to use the resources provided. Oil the other hand, the threats to these resources from online attacks require robust and effective Security to mitigate the risks faced. This raises two issues: ensuring that (I) the security mechanisms put in place are usable by the different users of the system, and (2) the security of the overall system satisfies the security needs of all its different stakeholders. A failure to address either of these issues call seriously jeopardise the success of e-Science projects.The aim of this paper is to firstly provide a detailed understanding of how these challenges call present themselves in practice in the development of e-Science applications. Secondly, this paper examines the steps that projects can undertake to ensure that security requirements are correctly identified, and security measures are usable by the intended research community. The research presented in this paper is based Oil four case studies of c-Science projects. Security design traditionally uses expert analysis of risks to the technology and deploys appropriate countermeasures to deal with them. However, these case studies highlight the importance of involving all stakeholders in the process of identifying security needs and designing secure and usable systems.For each case study, transcripts of the security analysis and design sessions were analysed to gain insight into the issues and factors that surround the design of usable security. The analysis concludes with a model explaining the relationships between the most important factors identified. This includes a detailed examination of the roles of responsibility, motivation and communication of stakeholders in the ongoing process of designing usable secure socio-technical systems such as e-Science. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

The Impact of Experiential Augmented Reality Applications on Fashion Purchase Intention

Utilizing the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model, the purpose of this study is to examine the effects of augmented reality (AR) (specifically augmentation) on consumers’ affective and behavioral response and to assess whether consumers’ hedonic motivation for shopping moderates this relationship. An experiment using the manipulation of AR and no AR was conducted with 162 participants aged between 18 and 35. Participants were recruited through snowball sampling and randomly assigned to the control or stimulus group. The hypothesized associations were analyzed using linear regression with bootstrapping. The paper demonstrates the benefit of using an experiential AR retail application (app) to positively impact purchase intention. The results show this effect is mediated by positive affective response. Furthermore, hedonic shopping motivation moderates the relationship between augmentation and the positive affective response. Because of the chosen research approach, the results may lack generalizability to other forms of augmentation. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed model using different types of AR stimuli. Furthermore, replication of the study with other populations would increase the generalizability of the findings. Results of this study provide a valuable reference for retailers of the benefits of using AR when attempting to optimize experiential value in online environments. The study contributes to experiential retail and consumer purchase behavior research by deepening the conceptualization of the impact of experiential technologies, more specifically AR apps, by considering the role of hedonic shopping motivations.Peer reviewe